Justin Chang

When she comes to, she's tied up in the basement of Teddy's farmhouse and shaved bald for reasons that only her captor can explain.

Your hair has been destroyed.

What ship?

Your mother's ship.

Teddy demands that Michelle take him and Don to her leader.

Michelle's response is startlingly cool and methodical.

Rather than screaming or pleading for her life, she calmly explains that she isn't an alien, and that Teddy and Dawn would be wise to let her go.

Even when she's incapacitated, she seems unnervingly in control of the situation, and you begin to wonder fairly early on if Michelle really is from Andromeda.

Weirdly, the answer almost doesn't matter, because there's always been something otherworldly about the way Lanthimos regards his characters.

Watching one of his movies, like Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is sort of like watching a strange behavioral experiment conducted by an extraterrestrial being.

Even so, Begonia doesn't have the staccato rhythms and bizarre non-sequiturs of most Lanthimos movies.

It was written by Will Tracy, a co-writer on the 2022 horror satire The Menu, and the dialogue has a lucidity that sucks you in.

Teddy strains to be polite with Michelle at first, but he starts to unravel as her barbed, insinuating words get under his skin.

The more Michelle talks, the more she backs Teddy into a corner, exposing layers of grief, trauma, bitterness, and disillusionment, especially concerning politics.

Teddy has been all over the ideological spectrum, alt-right, leftist, Marxist, but now shuns all labels, dismissing them as performative garbage.

Michelle seems to share his cynicism.

Or maybe she's just saying that to mess with him, in the same way that Lanthimos is messing with us.

Scene by scene, Begonia keeps us guessing.

Which of these two characters should we be more afraid of?

Is Teddy just another crackpot conspiracy theorist?